Can
radiation from cell phones affect the memory? Yes, at least it does so
in rat experiments at the Division of Neurosurgery, Lund University, in
Sweden. Henrietta Nittby studied rats that were exposed to mobile phone
radiation for two hours a week for more than a year. These rats had
poorer results on a memory test than rats that had not been exposed to
radiation.

The memory test consisted of releasing the rats in a
box with four objects mounted in it. These objects were different on
the two occasions, and the placement of the objects was different from
one time to the other.

The actual test trial was the third
occasion. This time the rats encountered two of the objects from the
first and two of the objects from the second occasion. The control rats
spent more time exploring the objects from the first occasion, which
were more interesting since the rats had not seen them for some time.
The experiment rats, on the other hand, evinced less pronounced
differences in interest.

Henrietta Nittby and her, supervisor
Professor Leif Salford, believe that the findings may be related to the
team's earlier findings, that is, that microwave radiation from cell
phones can affect the so-called blood-brain barrier. This is a barrier
that protects the brain by preventing substances circulating in the
blood from penetrating into the brain tissue and damaging nerve cells.
Leif Salford and his associates have previously found that albumin, a
protein that functions as a transport molecule in the blood, leaks into
brain tissue when laboratory animals are exposed to mobile phone
radiation.

The research team also found certain nerve damage in
the form of damaged nerve cells in the cerebral cortex and in the
hippocampus, the memory center of the brain. Albumin leakage occurs
directly after radiation, while the nerve damage occurs only later,
after four to eight weeks. Moreover, they have discovered alterations
in the activity of a large number of genes, not in individual genes but
in groups that are functionally related.

"We now see that
things happen to the brains of lab animals after cell phone radiation.
The next step is to try to understand why this happens," says Henrietta
Nittby. She has a cell phone herself, but never holds it to her ear,
using hands-free equipment instead.